An important professional activity undertaken by most physicians during the course of their day is the prescribing of drugs. Many physicians prescribe a great number of drugs every day. Studies show that over two thirds of all doctor-patient encounters were completed with the writing of a prescription. In 1993 typical prescribers were prescribing in excess of two hundred thousand dollars-worth of drugs annually. While most physicians exercise the utmost of professional skill and caution in prescribing, there are inherent difficulties and uncertainties in the process. Most physicians will probably agree that they do not have access to adequate, reliable drug information and relevant patient information at the time and point of prescription. In particular, information regarding relevant new drugs, comparative efficacy, and importantly, relative costs, may not be readily and conveniently available to a physician creating a new prescription, as well as relevant patient information such as current conditions being treated, current treatments, and preferred medications for conditions, pursuant to requirements of the patient's drug formulary.
Nevertheless, while accessing it is impractical for the typical practitioner, such information is available to any physician willing to take the time and make the effort to obtain it.
In contrast, integrated patient-specific information which is directly relevant to treatment management for the subject patient is frequently both unavailable to, and unobtainable by, a prescribing physician unless that physician's institution or organization has been exhaustively responsible for the subject patient's prior care and maintains sophisticated computerized records. Information as to allergies, current prescriptions and currently active conditions is clearly desirable or essential for intelligent prescribing. In 1994, few prescribing sessions are conducted with the benefits of integrated patient-specific information and fewer still have the benefit of specific drug formulary recommendations on the subject patient.
Drug formulary information is usually determinative of the cost-effectiveness of a prescription. Unwitting failure by a prescriber to follow formulary guidelines can impose unnecessary or unexpected cost burdens on the patient, or their benefits provider, and lead to poor patient compliance and aggravating and time-consuming disputes. The cost in dollars of non-compliance with drug formulary guidelines to benefit-providing corporations, insurers, health maintenance organizations and government providers, for example MEDICAID and MEDICARE, can be enormous. The cost of poor patient compliance may ultimately increase the total cost of care by generating a more serious, expensive adverse health outcome (emergency room visit, or hospital admission or death).
A difficulty in making integrated patient-specific information readily available to prescribing professionals is that the needed information components are not centralized but are widely distributed geographically and even when their geographic or electronic locations are known, are hard to access because of proprietary and liability and patient-confidentiality concerns and because of system, file or protocol incompatibilities.
Even in the computer-abundant United States, in the mid-90's, prescription writing is generally a manual process. After consulting with a patient to determine their problems and diagnosing, or attempting to diagnose their condition or disease, a physician selects a drug and a dosage and an amount to prescribe based upon their own personal knowledge and experience, if necessary using available reference materials which may or may not include promotional materials from drug manufacturers. A prescription is then written up under the physician's signature and bears a patient identification, a drug name, dosage amount and timing, refillability information and the physician's signature, the date, possibly an advisory regarding contraindications, and little other information. While a prescription may be typed, keyed or otherwise “generated” on a computer most prescriptions are still manually written.
Prescribing activity should be a good field for computerization, but one difficulty is the lack of apparent benefits to many physicians. Paper prescription pads are small and easily carried around by a physician. Manually writing a prescription will often be quicker and easier than using a computer, however good the system. The benefits of automated information systems often come not from greater data entry efficiency, but from the increased efficiency of the entire process, from the value of the transaction records generated and also from the control of the transaction entry process which may ensue. Physicians who are not computer-literate or who are even “computer-phobic” will require a most compelling reason to adopt a computerized prescription management system.
To be fully effective, a prescription management system must be readily usable by a wide range of physicians, preferably for all their prescribing activity must provide compelling value to patient care and increase overall treatment management efficiency. Providing an attractive computer-based system to physicians is fraught with unexpected difficulties.
Physicians and other health care professionals, especially those with prescribing authority, are representative of certain groups of professionals whose unique characteristics raise obstacles to the computerization of their day-to-day professional activities. Desirably, a computerized professional management system should be capable of flexible integration into their personalized and varied work flows.
Contrary to many perceptions and assumptions in conventional data-management systems intended for use by physicians, clinical physicians are not deskbound workers and do not usually have continuous access to a personal desktop computer during the course of their normal daily routine. To the contrary most physicians are ambulatory or even highly mobile, moving from room to room, from office to office, from hospital to hospital and to and from their car and home. While some physicians may spend the majority of their health care patient encounter activities at or near a desktop in their own office, such physicians are probably the exception. In clinics and hospitals physicians are often continually on the move between examination rooms, reception areas, administrative centers, hospital wards, specialist facilities such as radiology rooms and so on and so forth. In addition many physicians have more than one practice or more than one professional activity which takes them between an office or clinic and a hospital or other facility on a regular basis. Accordingly, it is a significant technical challenge to provide such mobile physicians with access to a computer-implemented management system that is readily available at the point of care.
Portable computers are a possible solution to the access problem now that powerful and compact notebook computers are widely available. Although currently available portable computers offer some advantages particularly to physicians moving between one work place and another, they also suffer certain drawbacks. One drawback is that external communication is difficult being commonly effected by moving diskettes, a valuable but limited method, or by modem connection to a telephone line which inconveniently requires plugging into a wall jack. Though possibly adequate for a physician having multiple offices, neither the communication means nor the portability of such systems is satisfactory for a ward physician moving from patient bed to patient bed. The weights and form factors of traditional portable computers are severe impediments to their assimilation into many clinical physicians' daily lives as dependable assistants to their professional work.
More recently, small handheld or palm computers known as personal digital assistants or personal information communicators have become available. An example is the Apple NEWTON (trademark). As of summer 1994, these are rather rudimentary devices as compared with desktop or full-powered portable systems, having modest permanent and RAM storage capacities and limited processing and communications abilities. Attractive to busy mobile professionals for their small size, such handheld computers can also embody highly desirable radio wave or infrared wireless communications abilities enabling them to exchange data with host systems without the cost or inconvenience of hard wiring.
Such portable hand held radio communicating computing devices are attractive for computerizing mobile professionals such as physicians, but their processing and storage limitations represent a real problem in providing a sophisticated, capable and attractive system for physicians.
A broad objective of this invention is to provide a prescription management system that can be used by physicians on such mobile computing devices.
Simply delivering a system on a convenient portable computer will not be enough to assure its regular use by a majority of physicians. Though highly educated and technically skilled, many physicians are not computer literate and are averse to confronting a computer screen. Some may even be intimidated by computers. Nor do their busy schedules permit time to learn complex or difficult systems. Even for an experienced user adoption of computer use into their daily routines requires time change and adaptation. With tremendous competition for their time, physicians will only be willing to take these steps if they are enticed by powerful system features that provides them with compelling value to patient care and overall practice management efficiency.
Nevertheless, the greatest of system features will be worthless if the system hinders the professional in executing routine functions. Even at sophisticated computer products companies with access to, and experience with, state-of-the-art systems, telephone sales staff often take down orders with pen and pad rather than using an on-line sales order systems.
An experienced professional practicing their specialty for example a pediatrician treating infants knows from experience exactly what to prescribe, in many instances. They will have neither the time nor the patience to work their way through conventional software selection and data entry procedures. Accordingly, a further object of this invention is to provide a prescription management system which personalizes itself to the prescribing patterns of experienced users.